4 YEARS AGO

Pages crawler not returning search results

We are a big fan of widgets in our projects and this typically requires us to use a specific smart search index type to scan our content. In these scenarios it is recommended to use the pages crawler index type which indexes the HTML output of the pages. The pages crawler is more accurate than the standard pages index type as it also indexes content rendered via web parts and widgets.

If you find it difficult to find the best smart search configuration for your projects then I would recommend you to use the “Smart Search troubleshooting poster” provided by Kentico. It is also a great resource for troubleshooting smart search issues (hence the name).

One issue that we ran into lately with the pages crawler index was that a search always resulted in: “No results were found”. We didn’t understand why this was happening because the index info displayed a large amount of indexed items with no errors in the event log. After going through the troubleshooting poster and documentation we noticed the following hint in the crawler settings screen:

“Sets the user account that the crawler uses to index pages. Ensures that the crawler loads the user-personalized content. If empty, the crawler uses the default ‘administrator’ account.”

This was interesting as we typically do not use the default administrator account in our websites. In fact we disabled the administrator account. After selecting a different user followed by a rebuild of the index, the search results started to popup and our problem was solved.